I love writing articles to boost my online PR naturally. I not only get extra visitors naturally as referrals but i can also get a few links out of it.......until now....i have found the 'nofollow' tag. I have been told this means that Google doesn't take any account of the fact that you spent 4 hours - or whatever - writing about your subject, and does not follow the link to chez vous. But Yahoo does.... Is this right? Do all article sites use nofollow? what to do..........ahhhh
In my experience I have only noticed a few article directories that use nofollow links, but I have not checked them recently. I assume this number will grow as article directory owners try to combat spam and decreasing PR. Yahoo does count nofollow links. I belive Google is the only search engine who actually uses the nofollow attribute. If Google is your main concern and you don't care about Yahoo rankings, you could just avoid those nofollow article directories and only submit articles to dofollow sites. Personally I would still submit my articles there if it might result in some direct traffic. Yahoo & MSN rankings are still a good reward too. With duplicate content filters, Google likely wouldn't count links from every instance of your article anyway. So this situation may not matter much. When I submit articles, I first submit it to just ezinearticles.com I wait for it to be approved on that website before submitting the article to more directories. That way if Google is only going to count one link from this article, it will likely be the one from the most beneficial article directory.
Not all article directories use nofollow tag. Search for a list of article directories without nofollow tag in google, and you will find many article directories.
Google will index what's on your page and in your article, it's the links leading off of their that is effected by nofollow. And Squidoo only has nofollow on a WIP (Work In Progress) lens. And HubPages has them on hubs that are under 50 HubScore or if the AuthorScore is under 75. EDIT: Sorry, I thought you were meaning article publishing sites, not article directories.
You can include those "nofollow article directories" in your list of article directories, I think google will only not follow those links to pass PR juice but have something in consideration maybe in authoritativeness points. I don't ignore them specially ArticleBase which gives good traffic even it is a "nofollow" directory.
Nofollow links are going to be the norm. Many believe Twitter and the other similar sites are also using nofollow links. If you don't care about what G thinks, nofollow links are not causing any harm, in the context of seo since the other SEs ignore nofollow links.